Human 4G Hotspots

We have all experienced situations where mobile data coverage has been poor. Well advertising and communcations firm BBH New York, have initiated a charity campaign called "Homeless Hotspot". Homeless people were engaged to roam the streets of Austin Texas during the SXSW Award week in March 2012, wearing T-Shirts reading "I am a 4G Hotspot" and offering conference-goers and other passersby access to the 4G Mobile data network for a donation.

BBH New York, states that "this charitable innovation initiative attempts to modernise the Street Newspaper model employed to support homeless population. At the same time providing a service to the data hungry public and a financial benefit to the homeless. 

There have been mixed reactions to this campaign. Call it a PR stunt or truely charitable gesture by BHH New York, either way the idea is a innovative one. 

Is this a PR stunt that is objectifying the homeless or is it truely innovative WiFi concept at the same time increasing awareness of the homeless, what do you think?

Human mobile data access points, Telco and ISP product managers take note!

Milk Sniff Replaced By Technology

The traditional method of identifying that your milk has gone past its life has been the trusty nose. Well does

your nose really know? Last month, crowdsourcing incubator Quirky teamed up with GE Garages and called out to the Quirky community to nominate an everyday item or process that can be improved.

The winning nomination came from San Diego entrepreneur Stephanie Burns, who wanted a milk jug that can indicate milk gone off without using the faithful nose sniff method or expiry date on the carton.
As a result, the Quirky Lab team have produced The Milkmaid which monitors your milk. It's a glass jug that has a PH sensor that monitors the PH level outside of the safe range. It also has a scale, wireless transceiver and a rechargable battery. If the milk PH level falls below the safe range, it triggers the green LEDs to turn yellow. The Milkmaid has a supporting iphone application to notifiy you if the ph or supply level drops below the mark to prompt you to buy more milk when required.

Is this too much technology for a simple problem?

Quirky are currently crowdsouricng votes for the correct price point for the Milkmaid. Another great example of a day to day issue been resloved with a smarter solution.

Despite Setbacks, Moving Forward in Clean Tech

When environmental history is written, 2010 could be seen a disaster for the clean technology industry. The

year dawned just after the disappointment that was December's U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen, where the nations of the world failed to produce a comprehensive treaty to cut carbon emissions — the sort of agreement that could have given business the long-term confidence to invest in clean tech. It didn't help that the overblown controversy known as "climategate" — which involved allegations of fraud by climate scientists — undermined trust in global warming science, letting skeptics back into the debate. Worst of all, the Senate failed even to vote on a bill that would have capped U.S. carbon emissions and produce a market designed to kick start clean tech. In America, at least, green tech seems to have gone backwards.

But that's a myopic view. In Europe, which already has a carbon market, investment in clean energy — including wind and solar — isn't going away. China has emerged as a major player in clean tech, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy and energy efficiency. In doing so, it's positioning itself to

lead the world in the industry of tomorrow. And even the U.S., for all its political problems, hasn't stood still: the Department of Energy, under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, has begun directly supporting innovative clean tech companies and pumping more money into basic research and development. Most  mportant, the U.S. — and especially Silicon Valley — is still home to what might be the world's most innovative entrepreneurs in clean tech. These folks are not short of smart ideas, as you'll see here.

Algae Biofuel

It's a dirty secret: the biggest renewable energy business in the U.S. isn't solar or wind or electric cars. It's plain old corn ethanol. Thanks largely to generous government subsidies, the U.S. produced 10.6 billion gallons of ethanol in 2009. That was enough to displace the need for 364 million barrels of oil, but study after study has shown that high levels of corn ethanol production simply aren't sustainable. Corn that could go to feed the world instead feeds our cars — and not very efficiently. The growth of corn ethanol has more to do with political realities in the U.S. (think Iowa, home of both corn and the first Presidential caucus) than it does with environmental ones.

But that doesn't mean biofuels can't play a major role in a greener U.S. energy policy — they just have to be the right kind. One of the best options on the horizon is biofuel made from algae, which counters a lot of the problems with corn ethanol. (The right strains of algae secrete oils that can be used to make fuel.) Algae do not need farmland to grow: tanks will do the job just fine anywhere there is spare land and a decent amount of sunshine. Algae also grow much faster than traditional crops, and the micro-organisms may be able to use to use wastewater or even saline water during their development, rather than fresh water. Startups like Sapphire Energy and Algenol in California and Florida are passing the pilot phase and nearing commercial development; they just need a little government help.

Solar Tower

There are two ways to harness energy from the sun. One is through photovoltaic panels, which transform sunlight directly to electricity. But — news flash — the sunlight also produces heat, which can be concentrated using mirrors to produce steam, which then drives electric turbines. It's this second form — called solar thermal or concentrated solar power — that has the most potential for utility-scale power generation. In fact, there are already solar thermal plants operating in the deserts of Nevada and California, using low rows of curved mirrors to concentrate sunlight.

But Bill Gross at eSolar thinks that he can improve on that fairly basic technology. Instead of rows of mirrors, eSolar uses vertical mirrored towers of that perfectly concentrate sunlight on a ground target. Using sophisticated software that Gross helped write himself — he was an Internet entrepreneur before breaking into alternative power — the mirrors perfectly track the sun as it crosses the sky, maximizing the amount of electricity that can be produced. The result is a relatively compact but power utility-scale plant that gets the most out of that free source of energy called the sun.

Custom Biofuels

Before alternative energy, biotech was the next big thing in California's Silicon Valley, with PhD-stocked

startups racing to decode the genome and create new and better drugs. But innovators are discovering that the two fields have a lot in common — especially when it comes to biofuels. First-generation biofuels are limited: corn ethanol packs less energy per gallon than petroleum, and new fuels like biodiesel often can't be used in car engines without expensive technical conversions. That's a hidden obstacle to wider adoption; there is a trillion-dollar infrastructure already in place around petroleum, and changing it won't be easy or cheap.

But what if you could adapt biofuels to use our current infrastructure, not the other way around? That's what a handful of biotech companies are doing right now. Startups like Amyris and LS9 are using the tools of biotechnology to produce new biofuels that are sustainable and ready for use in our cars and trucks right now. The companies create custom microbes in the lab that can produce biofuels to order — even "green crude" that has most of the benefits of petroleum without the drawbacks. The technology is still a long way from commercial scale, but it provides some of the best hopes for a biofuelled future.

Electric Cars

It's an article of faith among many environmentalists: the future will be electric. But how long is it going to take? Electric cars have been around since the dawn of the automobile — in fact, the technology hasn't changed all that much since Henry Ford's own electric Model-Ts. But the electric car lost out to gasoline-powered ones for good reasons: gasoline carries a lot of power per gallon, while batteries never had the capacity to move cars very far. Even in the 1990s, with the introduction of improved electrics like GM's lamentedly discontinued EV1, battery-powered cars remained a fetish for those who value their carbon footprint over convenience.

Times really have changed, though — and 2010 could finally mark the tipping point for electric cars. GM's long-awaited Volt — not a pure electric but a plug-in hybrid — is finally set to go on sale at the end of this year. The Japanese car company Nissan is going one better with its all-electric Leaf — the one with the polar bear ads — and Ford and Toyota have electrics in the works as well. Smaller startups are experimenting with ultra-efficient electric cars, while the innovative company Better Place is installing networks of battery-charging stations in Israel for its own electric transportation system, with a subscription payment system modeled on the wireless industry. Electric cars still have a number of obstacles to overcome, and they won't make a huge dent in carbon emissions unless the grid itself is steadily cleaned up, but they are closing in on the mainstream.